Slashdot Mirror
India Test-Fires Cryogenic Rocket Engine
alphakappa writes "Wired News reports that India has successfully testfired a cryogenic rocket engine that can be used to 'launch high-altitude satellites, send a man to the moon -- or build intercontinental ballistic missiles'. The rocket which typically has to fire for 12 minutes during flight was fired for 17 minutes during ground testing. So are we gonna see competition in the moon race? Remember, India has already spoken about sending a mission to the moon and it has joined the Galileo consortium along with China."
So are we gonna see competition in the moon race?
No, we're just going to see India launch a few satelites to show that they can (because if you can launch a satelite, you can build ICBM's), I doubt they will want to go to the moon.
So are we gonna see competition in the moon race?
Perhaps we should wait until India has actually placed someone in orbit before talking about a moonshot? I am all for an increase in competition when it comes to space, but aren't we getting a wee bit ahead of ourselves?
Lets also be realistic here; the only place India would want to hit with an ICBM is Pakistan, and they already have more conventional rockets which are plenty capable of doing that.
This rocket is just because they can, and no doubt also an attempt to attract international investment. After all, this is a great adverstisment for the education standards of your workforce if you're able to achieve complex technological goals like this.
Why steal? A significant of the students in US science and engineering programs are Indian, and I don't know how many are from China. It's funny, the US will "teach a man to fish" in countries that it bitches about IP theft, and will "give a man a fish" to 3rd world countries who really need some sort of economic base. Dumbasses.
The change is kinda interesting. Countries pouring their resources into science and exploration instead of another arms race (but it only takes one nation to start the whole thing again and if it happens there will be several players).
Spin offs include environmental technologies which never would have been developed. Smarter more exotic materials. Massive raw protein potential. Getting things to mars or even low earth orbit is alot easier from the moon then from earth. so on, so forth, etc.
the most sexp i get is my paren-mode.
Excuse me, but are you referring to the Apollo program as "useless"? If so, you are a fool.
In terms of long-term scientific and technological returns, the Apollo program in particular, and NASA in general have been some of the most well-spent gummint dollars in history.
It is also very hard to put a value on even one smart child who is inspired to do something great. I have never seen anything more inspirational in my life than the first man setting foot on the moon.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
I am a westerner and will now judge india in a burst of hubris:
I think India should also work on its leprosy poblem...and the plague.
Seriously, for a country to simultaniously have atomic weapons and diseases from the middle ages...that's scary.
Then again, there's been an increase in syphilis in the states lately...that's more 19th century than middle ages, but nobody's perfect.
You can't take the sky from me...
Yeah, it was bad timing for the Germans. If they had waited a couple of years to begin WW2, they probably would have had usable rocket technology which may have changed the course of the war.
Thankfully, Hitler was an egotist and pushed thousands of German intellectuals out of Germany and to America and other Allied nations.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
The actual quote is:
Sharma said the technology was "crucial to the ultimate moon shot," alluding to India's plan to send a manned mission to the moon before 2015.
It sounds like it's the journalist who concluded that the "moon shot" was about sending a man to the moon instead of just a satellite.
Never attribute to malice what can just as easily be accounted for by bad journalism.
Mmmm.. Donuts
Cyrogenic ICBMs are first-strike weapons. It takes so long to prep and fuel them that they're useless as a retaliation weapon. The opposition's ICBMs will land on your silos first. Keeping a cyrogenic system at a high state of readiness for years on end is difficult.
The Cuban missile crisis is sometimes said to have occured because the US put cyrogenic ICBMs in Turkey, aimed at the Soviet Union. That looked like the US was planning a first strike on Moscow. The Soviet Union had to respond to that threat.
(Decades later, interviews with the Soviet officials who made that decision revealed that most of them didn't look at it that way, but that's another issue. The communication-by-strategic-threat thing never worked as some of the gurus of deterrence thought it did. The most famous example of such miscommunication was that Kennedy's advisers thought the Soviet missile base in Cuba was deliberately laid out just like the ones in Russia so that the US would recognize it as a threat. Years later, the Red Army colonel in charge of building the base was asked about this, and said "No, we just did it that way because that's what the field manual said to do." All the military personnel present nodded in understanding.)
So it's a launcher, not an ICBM.
When we say poverty in india, we mean being unable to provide oneself even with daily bread.
There is no govt. program (at least one that works), to educate, support or at the least feed the really really poor indians. Any money generated thru welfare organizations is socked up internally by politicians and officials.
The fast rise of Islam and Christanity in India is mainly due to FREE food provided by the mosques and churches to poor people. I am not a religiously biased person, so I am not critisizing either one, But when a religion starts to get converts because it provides free food, instead of its principals and ideologies, you start wondering about the entire system.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
Technicly nukes would be a great choice for busting bunkers but the obvious danger is that once you make it acceptable to use little nukes it will be a lot more palatable to use big ones and to use them to solve more problems.
Its so ironic to see U.S. politicians rail against WMD's when its fact the U.S. always has been and continues to be in the forefront of developing and using them. Many of the nuclear documents found in Iraq were from the Eisenhower administration's "Atoms for Peace" program and were definitely dual use. And, of course, the U.S.was actively supporting Iraq when Saddam began using using chemical weapons. At the time time we were using him a as a proxy to wage war against Iran and fundementalist Islam. Iran was in danger of winning the war by using human wave attacks of young boys to overrun Iraq's trenches. We almost certainly encouraged or turned a blind eye to the use of chemical weapons to stave off these attacks and certainly did supply Iraq with precursors for chemical and biological weapons, anthrax in particular. We also supplied them with cluster bombs from Chile to use against these human waves. Some of the key players at the time VP George H.W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld.
You can't really blame countries for wanting nukes and missiles. Its one of the few methods for insuring the U.S. and everyone elese doesn't f**k with you.
@de_machina